1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a real-time remote backup system and a related method, and more specifically, to a real-time network data remote backup system and a related method which are capable of dynamically backing up file modification among a plurality of LINUX computer devices.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As network technology progresses, Internet appliances (or called “information appliances”), such as a network attached storage (NAS) device composed of redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID), are newly developed. Such NAS devices can be connected directly to a network system for allowing a remote user's computer system (source terminal) to store or download a large amount of data to/from the network storage device. In addition to user computer data storage, the NAS device can also be used as a remote backup system. However, in order to provide independent remote backup, the NAS device does not only need a random access memory (RAM) or a flash ROM, a plurality of hard disk drives (HDD) and IC controllers but also needs a specific embedded operating system (OS) and related applications. However, these OS and applications are all designed variously on base of demands of different manufacturers.
An automatic network backup software, called “RSYNC”, has been introduced. The software was first written by Andrew Tridgell, and successively modified by other programmers all around the world. This software is a free-ware under general public license of GNU, which is easy to install and able to perform rapid backups. A computer system having RSYNC installed can be a client or a server, or both at the same time. When the backup process is executed on two computer systems having RSYNC installed, such as a client and a server, a checksum test will be performed according to an RSYNC algorithm, and then the client can setup a backup time to check the checksum in order to find modified parts of files and perform a backup to the server instead of transmitting the whole file. In such a manner, the transmission speed and the efficiency of the file backup are improved.
However, in order to improve the backup ability of RSYNC, the following items are suggested: Rather than performing periodic checks for file modifications, if any file modification event occurs, a client computer system in a Linux environment should immediately notify RSYNC to backup the modified file. However, if it is required to dynamically catch any file modification message and automatically notify RSYNC to perform a backup, in a Linux environment, the kernel of the OS is also required to be rewritten and debugged. This is a very complicated task for a programmer.